A Hamas official said on Tuesday Israeli hostages can be brought home from Gaza only if a fragile ceasefire is respected, dismissing the “language of threats” after U.S. President Donald Trump said he would “let hell break out” if they were not freed.
Hamas has begun releasing some hostages gradually but postponed freeing any more until further notice, accusing Israel of violating the terms with several deadly shootings as well as hold-ups of some aid deliveries in Gaza.Israel denies holding back aid supplies and says it has fired on people who disregard warnings not to approach Israeli troop positions.
Trump, a close ally of Israel, said on Monday that Hamas should release all the hostages held by the Palestinian militant group by midday on Saturday or he would propose cancelling the Israel-Hamas ceasefire, which took effect on January 19.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel remained determined to get all the hostages back.
“We will continue to take determined and ruthless action until we return all of our hostages – the living and the deceased,” he said in a statement mourning Israeli Shlomo Mansour after the military confirmed he was killed during the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, that triggered the Gaza war.
Ahon Ohel, an Israeli still held hostage in Gaza nearly 500 days after gunmen seized him from a roadside bomb shelter in southern Israel, managed to get a message out from the Gaza tunnel where he was in captivity.
He sent a birthday wish for his sister via two other hostages who had been held with him and were freed on Saturday, his mother Idit Ohel said.
“Alon has been in the tunnels all this time,” Ohel told Reuters in an interview. “(He) hasn’t seen sunlight, doesn’t know the difference between day and night, has gotten little food – about one (piece of) bread a day.”
Trump has enraged Palestinians and Arab leaders and upended decades of U.S. policy that endorsed a possible two-state solution in the region by trying to impose his vision of Gaza, which has been devastated by an Israeli military offensive and is short of food, water and shelter, and in need of foreign aid.
“Trump must remember there is an agreement that must be respected by both parties, and this is the only way to bring back the (Israeli) prisoners. The language of threats has no value and only complicates matters,” senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters.
Trump has said the United States should take over Gaza – where many homes have been reduced to piles of cement, dust and twisted metal after 15 months of war – and move out its more than 2 million residents so that the Palestinian enclave can be turned into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.
Trump was to meet Jordan’s King Abdullah on Tuesday for what is likely to be a tense encounter over the president’s Gaza redevelopment idea, including a threat to cut aid to the U.S.-allied Arab country if it refuses to resettle Palestinians.
The forcible displacement of a population under military occupation is a war crime banned by the 1949 Geneva conventions.
Palestinians fear a repeat of what they call the Nakba, or catastrophe, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven out during the 1948 war that accompanied Israel’s creation. Israel denies they were forced out.
“We have to issue an ultimatum to Hamas. Cut off electricity and water, stop humanitarian aid. To open the gates of hell,” far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told a conference of the Institute for Ultra-Orthodox Strategy and Policy.
U.N. CHIEF WARNS OF ‘IMMENSE TRAGEDY’
The Gaza war has been paused since January 19 under the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas that was brokered by Qatar and Egypt with support from the United States.
More than 48,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war, the Gaza health ministry says, and nearly all of Gaza’s 2.3 million population has been internally displaced by the conflict, which has caused a hunger crisis.
Some 1,200 people were killed in the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on southern Israeli communities and about 250 were taken to Gaza as hostages, Israeli tallies show.
Trump’s ideas, which include a threat to cut aid to Egypt if it does not take in Palestinians, have introduced new complexity into a sensitive and explosive Middle East dynamic, including the shaky ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
For Jordan, Trump’s talk of resettling some 2 million Gazans comes dangerously close to its nightmare of a mass expulsion of Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank, echoing a vision of Jordan as an alternative Palestinian home that has long been propagated by ultra-nationalist Israelis.
Amman’s concern is being amplified by a surge in violence on its border with the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where Palestinian hopes of statehood are being rapidly eroded by expanding Jewish settlement.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on X on Tuesday that a resumption of armed conflict should be avoided at all costs because that would lead to “immense tragedy”.
“I appeal to Hamas to proceed with the planned liberation of hostages. Both sides must fully abide by their commitments in the ceasefire agreement and resume serious negotiations.”
The idea of a Palestinian state and Israel coexisting in peace has faded since 2014 when Palestinian and Israeli attempts at peacemaking in one of the most volatile and violent regions of the world stalled. (Reuters)